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What is Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) doing to incorporate an explicit commitment to develop strategies that reflect the perspectives and interests of local communities in an inclusive manner and evidence for the correlation between outcomes and inclusion?
Hello! Thanks for your question about the Kenya Community Development Foundation's efforts to incorporate an explicit commitment to develop strategies that reflect the perspectives and interests of local communities. The most useful sources I found to answer your question are the latest KCDF Annual Report and the Assessment of the KCDF by the World Bank. The short version is that since 2009 the KCDF has embarked upon an approach that aims to more aggressively evaluate issues before setting formal strategies. In addition, it has voiced a commitment to increase funding from local communities to increase their involvement in its efforts. Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
OVERVIEW OF THE KCDF: THEN AND NOW
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the KCDF is among the first and oldest of indigenous organizations to promote localized, community-driven, and horizontal philanthropy. Unlike the conventional top-down development model popular in the 1990s, which aimed to direct resources from rich to poor, or from external/international resources to internal communities, KCDF advanced a new model, focusing on local ownership of development and capacity building.
KCDF is unique among indigenous, philanthropic organizations in Africa. The organization raises money externally and internally to award grants to community-based organizations and aids these organizations in formulating and implementing development plans specific to the needs of each community. The process of receiving a grant requires partnering organizations to bring together constituents, identify the most pressing issues, and formulate a plan thereafter. The model, some would argue, is inherently inclusive.
While we prefer to rely only upon recent data, a somewhat dated-report by the World Bank is nonetheless instructive when it comes to the KCDF's history. The vision of KCDF resulted directly from local consultations with Kenyans and their founders' intent to figure out why previous poverty reduction strategies didn't work. The KCDF has changed in several significant ways. Prior to 2009, programming spanned 8 areas: early childhood education, girl-child development, education scholarships, food security, youth development, arts & culture, water, and endowment building. Post-2009, the KCDF undertook a massive rebranding effort to seek better implementation of its programs, increase its resource mobilization, and to harness the internet and social media to reach more people. Entering this new phase, the KCDF shifted its strategic timeline from three years to five years, and committed itself to rigorous evaluation before strategic planning. The resulting report, "Organizational Learning Assessment, 1997 to 2008", highlighted the need to continue raising resources locally for continued sustainability of its programming and grant-making. Now, with more than 25% of funds generated locally, the KCDF can worry less about shifting funding priorities common among external donors, while communities are more empowered to set their developmental agendas. Finally and notably, the KCDF now partners with firms in the private sector to mobilize even more resources for community organizations, particularly those aiming to help the most disenfranchised communities, such as urban slums.
THE ROLE OF INCLUSION IN THE KCDF MODEL
The KCDF currently works in all 8 provinces in Kenya, in diverse sectors, and is non-partisan. Community designated funds in each of these provinces are set up to address the unique, preferred issues in each community. Furthermore, the KCDF recently expanded its efforts to match funds raised by local communities for their own projects at a 1:1 ratio. While the KCDF still measures its impact by the number of people served across its different programs (e.g. 248 deaf people were given access to health care in 2014), the organization also measures impact by the number of funds contributed to local partnerships and community-driven efforts it supports directly. This is perhaps the most integral aspect of the organization. The KCDF incorporates inclusion via the organized community groups it works through, ensuring "they have appropriate governance structures accountable to beneficiaries and stakeholders."
KDCF'S INCLUSIVE INITIATIVES
There are examples of the KCDF's initiatives that were designed to build communities. For example, the organization worked with the Makutano Community Development Association (MCDA) to assist that organization with developing community-based organizations in Kenya. KCDF worked with MCDA in hiring local consultants. These consultants worked with local communities to better understand their needs and to develop strategies for empowering them. The process has been ongoing for 14 years.
KCDF has also worked with Zep-Re, an organization that works with disadvantaged girls. KCDF's role in the partnership is to bring in people from the private sector, as well as various governmental representatives in a collaborative effort designed to help these young girls. Emphasis is placed upon educational and employment programs and the girls are encouraged to give back to their communities.
The Programme Director of KCDF has been quoted in a 2016 article about his beliefs that social programs must be community-based. It is the local communities that can better control their own resources. One of their programs in this regard is "Pamoja for Change/Together for Change." Funding for such programs comes from multiple organizations and some of it is matched by KCDF. A review of their "Call for Proposal" shows that KCDF issues grants for such programs as "Pamoja for Change/Together for Change" when the applicant can demonstrate efforts to assist the community through local community organization. KCDF also is involved with the Kenyan Philanthropy Forum, that further seeks to create partnerships that can help with community development. The organization is also credited with assisting development of the Maasai community by encouraging community members to undertake projects on their own, rather than relying upon outside sources.
An example of the private-sector partnership approach is found in the Mentenda initiative in which KCDF partnered with NIC Bank. The purpose of the endeavor was to adopt young men who had come from the Upper Hill School. The NIC Bank members mentored these students, the hope being that the mentoring would help to create better community citizens in the future.
Other examples of the organization's inclusive approach are found in its own reports. In its 2013 issue of My Community, KCDF describes multiple programs, including a specific program targeting the deaf. At large, KCDF has expanded to target not merely the economically disadvantaged, but also socially disenfranchised groups, such as sex workers.
POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS
While the KCDF model is based on inclusion of local communities in every aspect of each community's development path, in no recent report does the foundation identify how they choose employees, executive leadership, or board members. For example, board members are chosen "from among people of integrity from various backgrounds who buy into the vision of the Foundation". Grantees, on the other hand, are selected via a very transparent, competitive process outlined in the application.
Publications on the site span annual reports, but no specific, critical evaluation report is available. In their Strategic Plan for 2009-2013, the KCDF sets the goal for taking on rigorous evaluation, using constituent feedback, but no evidence of any evaluative work has yet been published. There is no mention of an inclusion strategy, nor does the KCDF outline the process by which the organization ensures representation and inclusion of all groups. However, the partnership between the Makutano Community Development Association and the KCDF provides an insightful outline of how KCDF works and insures participation of constituents via its partners. When the KCDF awarded the MCDA its first three-year grant, the support was contingent upon the involvement of community members in open meetings and discussions to "investigate and define their own contextual challenges" and ensure that inequalities spanning gender or education (among other indices) were identified and included among priorities. This model has been replicated for virtually all of KCDF's partners.
While I found little mention of "inclusion" in recent annual reports, news publications, or strategy, KCDF nevertheless evaluates its efforts based on the extent to which community-inspired projects and priorities are identified and supported. Taken together, while the model of the KCDF has not changed significantly since 1997, it has nevertheless evolved. Its model is fundamentally rooted in inclusion - both in how community organizations must demonstrate inclusivity when receiving grants and making development plans and the specific communities served. And it must also be said that, in all fairness, what we did not find were complaints about the non-inclusivity of KCDF's operation.
The problem, however, is that the KCDF's evaluation of its efforts, does not necessarily equate with results. Thus, the full extent to which the KCDF advances inclusive policies is unclear. What the KCDF must improve upon going forward is gathering community feedback and evaluations, rather than simply focusing on numbers/infographics to demonstrate its impact. Its newer publication, My Community, is an excellent step forward.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, the KCDF has evolved over time to a point where it is making efforts to be more inclusive of the needs and concerns of local communities. However, despite its stated efforts in this regard, it has provided little in the way of hard evidence to show that it is succeeding in these efforts, anecdotal evidence notwithstanding.
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